More change between Bush's terms than between Bush and Obama?

In an eloquent piece in the latest issue of Foreign Policy, Chris Brose makes the best case yet that George W. Bush laid the foundations of a solid foreign policy in his second term:

The pragmatic internationalism that Bush will pass to Obama was largely defined through changes made during the past four years. And for that reason, there might be more continuity between the second term of Bush and the first term of Obama than between the two terms of Bush himself. This foreign policy is a valuable inheritance. And if Obama avoids spending his early years in office pursuing change for the sake of change—simply trying to disassociate himself from his predecessor, as Clinton and Bush too often did—he could create the makings of a new bipartisan consensus on foreign policy.

Obama might realize this, but the Democratic and Republican parties, I fear, will not. They could each pretend as if Bush’s second-term foreign policy never happened. At worst, Democrats could swagger righteously into power, believing their predecessors were rubes who screwed everything up, and now is the chance to do everything differently. For their part, Republicans could tell themselves the comforting lie that they lost because Bush abandoned a real conservative foreign policy—that his second term was all capitulation to the striped-pants appeasers of the State Department.

One of my regrets about my work at the State Department is that we were unable to convince the American people that Bush’s pragmatic internationalism had within it the makings of a strong, sustainable global leadership for the 21st century—and that, as such, it had the potential to heal some of the fraught divisions over America’s role in the world that have plagued the country since the end of the Cold War. My hope is that Obama will not only continue this foreign policy, but strengthen it and expand support for it among all Americans. Were he able to do that, it would truly be a change I could believe in.

Brose dropped this on me in his office right before I was expected to deliver a blistering critique of Bush policy at a roundtable, and he kind of took the wind out of my sails. I knew then that his was the argument to beat. There’s much in what he says. The rebuttal, I think, is what Bush did in his first term. Just as asset bubbles take a while to inflate and don’t burst overnight, it took some time for the gravity of Bush’s first-term mistakes to sink in with the population. So it’s not altogether surprising that the 2008 election delivered a harsh referendum on the Bush years.

There are limits to what the American people will bear, and there are limits to what the U.S. can accomplish abroad. Brose’s strongest point, I think, is that

Bush will also bequeath to Obama a realistic strategy for managing the rise of great powers. By pushing China, India, Japan, Brazil, and others to be responsible stakeholders in the international order, the Bush administration showed that “the rise of the rest” need not be synonymous with America’s decline. In fact, it might actually enhance U.S. influence. In Asia, the most geopolitically dynamic part of the world, the United States now has better relations with each major power than they do with one another. Every state wants to hedge against the others, and the partner of choice is Washington. Obama’s task will be to continue inducing these emerging powers to share a greater burden of managing a new set of global challenges that no country, including the United States, can manage alone.

That sounds a lot like realism. But that begs the question: why wasn’t Bush doing this all along? And couldn’t he have gotten us here without fighting a reckless and counterproductive war that agglomerated adversaries in the Middle East instead of dividing and conquering them?